


Other Eyes

by jottingprosaist (jane_potter)



Series: The Wheel Turns [3]
Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Gen, Is there even a difference?, Prequel, Where do I end and where does the dragon begin?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-13 20:13:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9140509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jane_potter/pseuds/jottingprosaist
Summary: The Dragonborn Lleros' first meeting with Ulfric Stormcloak, retold.(Stormcloak's dismissal and derision made you feel small. Defensive. His anger made him huge, even more so than the throne that let him loom above you. Then there was your anger rising to meet his, slipping its leash–- and maybe you could yet have bitten your tongue on insulted rage, marshalled some semblance of manners, but then Stormcloak threw down the challenge, uttering, “I wouldn’t call myself concerned, in this case.”And you rose to it.)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chamerion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chamerion/gifts).



> From a tumblr prompt by Chamerion, for "POV — something that’s already happened, retold from another character’s perspective." Takes place during Chapter 3 of Like Lightning, retold from Lleros' perspective.

You knew, stepping into the Palace of the Kings, that you would have to be careful: watch every word, every gesture, every expression. You were walking into a bear’s den.

But it didn’t work out that way. All your planned words and your expectations fell to pieces in the face of Ulfric Stormcloak for no single reason you could name, just a dozen small reasons. His dismissal and derision made you feel small. Defensive. His _anger_  made him huge, even more so than the throne that let him loom above you. Then there was your anger rising to meet his, slipping its leash– and maybe you could yet have bitten your tongue on insulted rage, marshalled some semblance of manners, but then Stormcloak threw down the challenge, uttering, “I wouldn’t call myself concerned, in this case.”

And you rose to it.

( _FO_ )

Or the thing in your chest rose to it. You didn’t know which. Maybe it was both. Maybe there was no _other_ , just… _Dovahkiin_. But–

( _KRAH_ )

–but gods, four days after swallowing an inferno on Bonestrewn Crest, you could have sworn you still felt something terrible writhe beneath your ribcage, a rage separate from your own that hated Stormcloak not as a man but as a _mortal._

( _DIIN_ )

The naked shock on Stormcloak’s face filled you with as much savage satisfaction as the thrum of power through your chest. Yes, let him see, let him _know_  who stood before him; let him know himself a damned fucking fool to have assumed– how _dare_  he have assumed–

In hindsight, that line of thought was frightening. It wasn’t  _you_. Six whole days after eating Ranmaariisk’s soul, you should have been well clear of that… that battle-madness, that mental dislocation of a bone popped back in somehow too big for its socket. It had never lasted so long in the beginning.

Yet along with the fear, you carried the anger and the satisfaction and the memory: grey eyes, wide and astonished, and a voice ordinarily so confident stunned to silence. (So wrong, to feel this way. So _right_.) You kept it burning like an ember in your chest as you strode back into the cold of the spring sun; you tasted power lingering at the back of your throat in between conversations with merchants; you turned restlessly in bed reliving those moments over and over again before sleep finally came.

Revelation woke you in the deep of the night, when Candlehearth Hall’s inhabitants were all so still in their beds that not even the floorboards creaked. Some fragment of dream and memory had collided, and you knew.

It was not the remnants of Ranmaariisk that had made Stormcloak’s shock feel so right. In those moments when you had spoken Frost to humble a cold man, you had looked with _Mirmulnir’s_ eyes and seen something half reality, half memory. You had been Dovah(kiin), great and impossible, screaming your rage and power to a mortal transfixed by what had burst in to change his life.


End file.
